Biography

Alex Waterman is a founding member of the Plus Minus Ensemble, based in Brussels and London, specializing in avant-garde and experimental music. In New York he performs with the Either/Or Ensemble. Alex has worked with musicians such as Robert Ashley, Richard Barrett, Helmut Lachenmann, Keith Rowe, Marina Rosenfeld, Anthony Coleman, Elliot Sharp, Ned Rothenberg, Gerry Hemingway, David Watson, Chris Mann, Alison Knowles, Thomas Meadowcroft, and Michael Finnissy. He has performed as guest musician with numerous ensembles, including Trio Event (Berlin), Champs d'Action-Antwerp, Q-O2-Brussels, and Magpie Music and Dance Company. Waterman has made music for numerous European ballet and modern dance companies including Freiburg Ballett/Pretty Ugly, Scapino Ballet, Nederland Dans Theater III, and others. In 2007 Alex curated two exhibitions in New York, one on experimental music and poetics: Agapê (June 2-July 28th, 2007) at Miguel Abreu Gallery; and the other on graphic notation, Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music (September 7-October 20, 2007) at The Kitchen in Chelsea. Publications for Between Thought and Sound and Agape are available.

Alex is presently working on his PhD in musicology at NYU as well as writing a book about the composer Robert Ashley with the designer and writer Will Holder. Alex participated in Dexter Sinister's residency at the Armory for the 2008 Whitney Biennial writing a new work based upon Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener. Alex Waterman and Beatrice Gibson's collectively written and scored film, A Necessary Music, narrated by Robert Ashley and with original music by Waterman, premiered at the Whitney Museum ISP show and won the Tiger Prize for Best Short Film at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2008. Alex lectured and performed as part of the exhibition The Possibility of Action at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in 2008, and was in residence at the ICA in May 2009 with his ensemble, in addition to performing solo works. He installed a permanent 12 speaker sound installation out in Napa Valley in July of 2009 at the residence of Norah and Norman Stone, and is presently working on the sound track for a new film project by Cameron Gainer in Vieques, and launching his record label (D.S. al coda). His writings have been published by Dot Dot Dot, Paregon, FoArm, Bomb, and Artforum.

Press and Reviews

"(Richard)Carrick’s relative gentleness was all but blown out of the room by Alex Waterman’s ferocious reading of Kottos, in which Iannis Xenakis asks the cellist to pressure the instrument into a sputtering explosion of harmonics and noise. The unearthly beauty produced seems borne of a planet in constant, seething turmoil, where snarling, lunging glissandi are the sounds of the day. I can’t imagine a cellist applying more dedication than what Waterman unleashed, like Bartók on steroids."
  --Bruce Hodges

Free Music Archive:

Alex Waterman on Free Music Archive

New World Radio:

Alex Waterman on New World Radio

UbuWeb:

A Necessary Music on UbuWeb

New York Times:

Picks for 2007, Bernard Holland

Artforum:

Art Forum Critic's Picks: T. Nikki Cesare, 9/07

Alison Knowles: Top Ten, 9/07

Eileen Quinlan: Top Ten, 1/07

Alex Waterman: Top Ten Music of 2007

Time Out NYC:

2008's Top Live Show: Miya Masaoka and Alex Waterman, 01/08

More Kind Words:

Excerpt from Bruce Hodges' review in Seen and Heard International
(A review of the concert pictured at The Kitchen, 2007.)

With the skill and dedication of three archaeologists, Either/Or founders Richard Carrick and David Shively, with the help of cellist Alex Waterman, presented an unusually interesting look at some artifacts from the avant garde of the 1950s and 1960s (with one vault into the 1970s). Held in The Kitchen’s high-ceilinged upstairs gallery, the concert had a “turning back the clock” effect, enhanced by some pillow seating on the floor. On the walls, an exhibit co-curated by Waterman called Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music showed the sometimes-startling variety of composers’ visual notation, from a tightly-ordered pattern of tiny blocks, to a huge sheet of brown paper daubed with wisps of paint...

Waterman made an intelligent case for one of Morton Feldman’s shorter works, Projection 1, with typical delicate tones competing for attention with pauses. With acute attention to phrasing and dynamics, Waterman breathed uncanny life into a work that seemed over too soon.
  --Bruce Hodges